


In Pieces

by JazzRaft



Series: Dark at Night [35]
Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Heavy Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-15
Updated: 2017-03-15
Packaged: 2018-10-05 20:56:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10316813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JazzRaft/pseuds/JazzRaft
Summary: Everything falls apart after Altissia. Nyx doesn't know how to put it all back together again. And Noctis wouldn't let him, even if he knew.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on [tumblr](http://jazzraft.tumblr.com/post/157157513607/i-found-i-dont-need-you-really-completely-by) for an anonymous request.

Nyx knew something was wrong the instant he set foot in the room and Noctis was curled into the window-seat rather than curled beneath the bed covers.

Well, more wrong than everything about Altissia since the day of Leviathan’s awakening. More wrong than the massive, flooded plane of destroyed homes and broken promises in the distance. More wrong than the vacant, lightless feeling that seemed to permeate the entire world without the Oracle there to brighten it.

It was more wrong than the paralytic grief which assailed Noctis after receiving news of her death. It was more wrong than the silent tear-stains Nyx tried to brush away in his sleep, only to find them replaced by fresh ones the next night he visited.

Nyx couldn’t read him. He walked into the suite, saw Noctis staring out the window, and he was suddenly blind. The prince had never been a blank page to him. His heart peered out just from beneath the edge of his sleeve and Nyx could coax it into his open palm with a hushed word there, a crooked smile here, a little nuzzling right _there_. But now? Noctis had shut himself so tightly inside that Nyx was scared he’d never be able to draw him out again.

“Feeling a little better today?” he asked from his station across the room, habitually folding his arms behind his back and assuming the Kingsglaive stance.

Noctis didn’t respond, motionless as a still life portrait in the window-frame. Altissia’s destruction stretched deep and murky blue beyond. Nyx wondered if he was looking for Luna inside of it. Nyx really hoped that he found her. And if he didn’t, Nyx was still determined to find her himself. The rescue teams hated him for his interference, but they were too slow and too scared to dive into the places he knew they hadn’t checked. Not that there was anything to find once he did.

“Prompto wanted to know if he could come by soon,” he said into the silence, hoping that if he couldn’t summon the prince’s attention, maybe the idea of seeing his best friend would. “You look like you might be up for it. Can I give him the okay?”

Nothing. Nyx’s nails dug into his elbows to restrain his frustration. He wasn’t irritated with Noctis – not like the hints he’d been hearing Gladiolus catch himself on whenever they discussed how much longer they were going to linger in Altissia. Nyx was mad at himself because he should have been better at this. He should have known what to say, what to do, how to _be_ for Noctis in his grief by now.

He’d been a fish out of water when he had to confirm the reports of his father’s death. Noctis had cried in his arms a few times before so, Nyx thought he would know what to do the night he’d woken in the tent to find Noctis gone. He thought he would know what to say when he found him sobbing on the shores of the lake just down the haven’s foot-path. He thought he could do better than to just fold him against his chest and let him cry into the silent night, unable to find a single word of comfort to help him.

Noctis hadn’t even let him do that much when Luna died.

“Okay…” Nyx said, throat dry and feeling useless. “If you need me, I’ll just be…”

“I don’t.”

It was barely a brush of noise from the prince in the stagnant quiet. It hardly even sounded like him. Nyx hadn’t heard him speak in weeks. Nyx thought he would be relieved to hear the sound of his voice again after so long, that he could take it as a sign of his recovery. Rather than be warmed by the return of his rebellious rasp, Nyx only felt cold by how empty it was.

“I don’t need you, really,” Noctis said, tonelessly. “I don’t need any of you. I’ll do the rest on my own. You’re all free to go.”

All it took was a few lies for Nyx to remember how to read him again. He suddenly realized that it wasn’t Luna he was looking for in the distant floodwaters. He was looking for what would become of the rest of them. And he was looking at how everything was broken because of _him_. He’d heard the hints of it when Noctis had grieved Regis, had caught him taking the blame for Insomnia as if it had been him that commanded the Niflheim MTs.

It was a callous kind of amusement that curled Nyx’s mouth into a smirk as he wondered if half of Noctis’s silence in the time since Luna had died had been to avoid Nyx reading him like an open book. He’d been quiet so he could steep in his own self-loathing without anyone debating him on it. Telling him that none of it was his fault. Telling him _the truth_.

“Well,” Nyx snorted into the quiet. “How about that for appreciation? A lifetime of service between the four of us and what are we going to get for it? A ‘so long’ and a dead king in another week?”

“I’m not joking, Nyx!”

That finally got Noctis to move and to glare at Nyx. He’d take the wrathful look if it meant he got to look him in the eye again. They were washed out and red around the edges, but hard at their center. Days of tears had compounded his sorrow for Luna into anger for himself.

“This time it was Luna’s life and Iggy’s sight. In Lestallum it was Gladio’s scars. In Insomnia it was Dad and it was almost you… Who’s it going to be next time? Prompto? _All_ of you? When it should have always been _me_?”

“This is our job, Noct, we’re supposed to take the heavy hits for you…”

“I never asked you to!”

Noctis jumped up from his seat. He stood like he was ready to run into Nyx and enact some sort of violence against him, all tight lines and clenched muscles. For a moment, he looked trapped, hands opening and closing at his sides, eyes raking across the floor as if he were looking for a way out through it. Or for a way to convince Nyx to leave, and take the others with him. He blinked hard when he couldn’t find one, his resolve to carry on alone quickly slipping from his indecisive fists.

In his frantic search for nothing, his roving eyes passed over Nyx’s and they fractured. His teeth clenched down on a furious sob as he turned his back on him, his arms coming up to paw at his face to try and wrestle some sort of control over himself. He couldn’t regain his composure quickly enough before the next words slipped out, tremulous and honest like the man Nyx loved, not the king he was trying to be.

“I’m sick of watching people die for loving me,” Noctis choked out.

Nyx carefully braved the distance between them, knowing he had to reach Noctis now lest he be shut out again for good. He touched his arm only to have Noctis recoil, a pained noise clotting in the back of his throat.

“Come on, Noct. I know you don’t want to be alone in this.”

“No,” Noctis whispered, words shaking with the effort it took to try and make them sound more like a demand than a plea. “But even if we go on together, I know I’m still going to lose all of you.”

He was lost between wanting to be alone because he decided he should be, and being alone because someone took them all away from him. He’d already imagined their deaths a hundred times in the wake of Luna’s. Nyx could see it in the haunted anguish of the eyes he was trying so hard to hide from him, dropping his head so his hair would fall over them, pushing his hands into the corners to cover them, anything to keep Nyx from pulling them to his own to convince him he was wrong.

Instead Nyx just pulled him to his chest and said nothing. Maybe what Nyx had assumed as his fault in comfort, was actually what Noctis needed. Maybe it was just company in his isolation, not an argument for his selfless nature, not a debate about how he wasn’t wrong. Maybe that was what he really needed to carry him through.

Because rather than the rejection Nyx was expecting for the embrace, Noctis’s arms clamped around him, hands digging into the back of his coat and clutching himself deep against him. He didn’t want to be alone, but he didn’t want to be told he shouldn’t be. He wanted to be worth sacrifice, but he didn’t want to deserve it. He was a prisoner of his own contradictions and nothing either of them could say would be able to free him from them.

If he wanted to hate himself, then Nyx resigned himself into letting him.

He would just have to love him enough for the both of them.


End file.
